Collaborative Entrepreneurship for Continuous Innovation: A Strategic Alliance Perspective

Strategic alliances act as a platform to implement collaborative entrepreneurship while exposing a range of challenges. By capitalizing on entrepreneurial opportunities for continuous innovation, alliance partners can promote the productive utilization of resource-pooling systems and facilitate innovation processes for value co-creation. Simultaneously, the heterogeneity of partners in terms of different motivations and interests interferes with the advancement of collaborative entrepreneurship for resource exchange and orchestration. The objective of this paper is thus to explore how to deal with the potential coordination issues that can make an alliance vulnerable and its returns diminished through a preliminary integrative approach to the interface between collaborative entrepreneurship and strategic alliances. From this approach, three elements that can contribute to leverage values of collaborative entrepreneurship for continuous innovation are identified: social capital, entrepreneurial orientation, and interorganizational learning. Based on the discussion about the functions of each element in the context of alliance partners’ dynamic interactions, a model of analysis on collaborative entrepreneurship for continuous innovation is proposed. Hence, this chapter contributes to a better understanding of how firms can enact collaborative entrepreneurship productively to gain greater benefit from the alliance configuration for collaborative advantage.